Academic Festival 2013: The Sessions

[Editor’s note: The following includes write-ups and videos
of only some of the sessions at Academic Festival. More will be posted soon.]

All the
Right Moves: Learning With Gestural Mobile Devices

Ever notice that people talk with their hands?

So have the creators of smart phones, iPads and other
latest-generation tools that are rapidly consigning the keyboard-and-mouse,
point-and-click era to the dustbin of technological history.

These changes reflect a growing body of research showing
that gestures are not random, but in fact correspond to ideas being expressed,
said John Black, TC’s Cleveland A. Dodge Professor of Telecommunications and
Education, in introducing a panel of students and alumni who are working at the
cutting edge of learning technology.

Ayelet Segal (Ph.D. ’11) told listeners that in her
dissertation research, she found that children who played certain mathematics
learning games on iPads performed better and were more engaged than when using
a mouse version. But the gestures the app requires have to be the right ones,
she said. “If the child counts individual blocks, the gesture has to be
discrete. But for estimating a number on a continuous like, a continuous
gesture” – such as swiping one’s finger along a line – “supports performance
better.” Segal has applied her research in an app, titled MathGlow, released by
the company she founded, iGeneration.

Michael Swart, a TC Doctoral Research Fellow, showed clips
of researchers talking to children about concepts used in teaching fractions:
What is the whole? What are the parts? Are some parts bigger or smaller than
others? “Watch the gestures the child makes,” Swart said. Different gestures --
such as grasping, pointing, making a gathering motion -- apply to different
steps on the way to learning fractions and putting them in use. “We’ve found
out what gestures kids use when talking about fractions,” Swart said. Now his
team is developing a game, illustrated by cartoon characters from the
educational television program Cyberchase, to put these results into effect.

But every interface has its limits as well. Inputting
information remains awkward, as anyone who has tried to write a long message on
an iPad knows, said Nabeel Ahmad (Ed.D. ’09), a TC adjunct professor and a
Learning Developer at IBM. “The new big thing is voice,” Ahmad said, pointing
to Apple’s “Siri” tool as an illustration. Segal said researchers are now
studying the cognitive embodiment of freeform, three-dimensional gestures.
Touchscreen devices have quickly opened new horizons for learning and made new
tools possible, but the next revolution might be coming even faster.

The
Changing Face of Leadership

When David Johns (M.A. ’06) was serving on the committee
planning President Obama’s second-term inauguration, he ran up against a
colleague who wanted to seat the surviving Tuskegee Airmen – the first African American
military pilots, who served in World War II -- in the balcony at a presidential
gala.

The
hell she’s going to put them in the balcony, Johns remembers
thinking -- but he also was careful not to blow up. “It was important to
acknowledge she wasn’t thinking maliciously,” he recalls. Instead, he invited his
colleague for a walk and a coffee, and engaged her in friendly discussion of
the Tuskegee Airmen and their significance in national and African American
history. Outcome: seating decision rescinded.

“We always have resources,” Johns, now Executive Director of
the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for African Americans,
said during a Milbank Chapel panel discussion on “leading for inclusion” in
today’s diverse workplaces and society. “We have to find ways to be strategic
connecting the dots, listen to what people articulate as concerns, find people
who can carry water you can’t carry.”

Other speakers shared similar moments of vexation. Danielle
Moss-Lee (Ed.D. ’06), CEO of the YWCA of the City of New York, recounted how a
funder informed her that “14 year-old African American girls don’t know how to
keep their legs closed.” “I need to tell and repeat that story,” Moss-Lee said.
“We tend to be self-congratulatory and say we have overcome, but we haven’t
overcome. At some point you have to say, ‘Flag on the play!’”

All the panelists agreed that the cultivation of allies is a
critical practice in building an inclusive community is in the cultivation of
allies. “Straight allies have been absolutely critical for the LGBT movement,”
said Kevin Jennings (M.A. ’94), executive director of the Arcus Foundation, a
former Obama administration official and founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and
Straight Education Network. “The real role models we need are what non-sexist
men look like, or non-racist white people, and so on.”

Current M.A. candidate Joianne Pyram said that building
inclusive communities requires “challenging people in power to recognize
privilege.” That extends to new leaders who are themselves minorities. “It’s
essential to be accountable to give back and help others along the way,” she
said. “Those of us who come from marginalized groups, sometimes we forget to
give that hand back. We too have a social responsibility.”

Finally, there was general agreement that while it’s
important to be able to draw a line in the sand, leaders also need to take the
long view. “As Linda Darling-Hammond taught me here, change is a process, not
an event,” Jennings said, referring to the former TC professor who is now at
Stanford. “We haven’t been working on this since the 1960s, we’ve been working
on it since the 17th century. Each decade, our circle has broadened.
Let’s take joy in it. Our job is to do our piece.”

Leading
the Way: Higher Education in the 21st Century

“What’s the biggest challenge facing higher education?”

That was the central question posed by TC President Susan
Fuhrman to a panel of TC graduates who serve as college or university
presidents.

For Joel Bloom (Ed.D. ’78), President of New Jersey
Institute of Technology (NJIT), the answer was: “Encouraging more pre-college
students to engage in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)
disciplines.” At NJIT, addressing that challenge has entailed sowing the seeds
in high schools and even elementary and middle schools in the university’s home
community of Newark and Essex County. Each year, he said, about 150 students
enroll at NJIT as a direct result of these local programs.

Regina Peruggi (Ed.D. ’91), President of Kingsborough
Community College, part of the City University of New York, similarly flagged
the importance of alignment with K-12 schools.

“Unless something happens with the high schools, thousands
of students are coming out without the skills they need to do college work,” said
Peruggi, whose institution serves students from a wide range of ethnic and
cultural backgrounds. “There’s a real problem arising where you could not have
the capacity to open the doors for thousands who want to get in and get skills
to be successful. And then you’ll end up with a two-tiered society.”

Joseph Bertolino (Ed.D. ’03), in his first year as president
of Lyndon State, the only college in a 50-mile radius in Vermont’s Northeast
Kingdom, said his challenge is more about convincing high school students and
their families that Lyndon State is aligned with their needs. “We’re a small
rural college, the only game in town,” he said, with a high proportion of
first-in-family students. “We need to be reassuring folks that college
education is still valuable.”

To that end, schools certainly need to position themselves
as cutting-edge by offering co-curricular activities, joint volunteering,
clinical work and, above all, high-tech resources, including distance learning
and MOOCs, or “massive open online courses.” But the speakers also cautioned
that technology’s value extends only so far.

“We do a lot of distance learning, but the real education
goes on on campus,” Bloom said. “College goes beyond technology. It’s the
ability to communicate, interpersonal relations, being part of a learning
community, working as a team.”

Marcia Keizs (Ed.D. ’84), President of York College (also
part of the CUNY system), said that brick-and-mortar college learning is
particularly important for students from marginalized backgrounds. “They need
connection to the institution and quality face time with faculty who are going
to mentor them up,” Keizs said. “Especially inner city students who have been
failed – we need to bring them into these traditions.”

“TC’s international impact has always been through its
exchanges. Educators of all stripes have come here from abroad, from graduate
students to Ministers of Education and of course our faculty, students and
alumni have been active around the world.”

The speaker, Marion Boultbee, knew whereof she spoke. In
addition to holding a TC doctorate in in International Education Development,
Boultbee served for years as the College’s Director of International Services.

Boultbee moderated a session that gave the flavor of TC’s
extensive international engagement through presentations on several key
efforts. She was joined by Portia Williams, Executive Director of TC’s Office
of International Affairs, which was established by President Susan Fuhrman in
2008.

“Susans vision was that, while a lot of our faculty were
doing work in regions all over the world, she wanted to engage institutionally
with other universities and ministries of education,” Williams said. “We do
that in ways that are collaborative – not by establishing campuses abroad, but
instead by working with other countries to help them build capacity.”

Peter Moock, a veteran of TC’s 1960s-era Teachers for East
Africa program, recalled that the program grew out of a conference convened at
Princeton University by the American Council on Education during the fall of
1960, at which African educators expressed concern about their nations’
capacity to produce a new generation of citizens who could assume leadership
roles. Those fears were amplified by the
region’s acute shortage of secondary school teachers, said Moock, who later
served as Associate Professor Economics and Education at TC and then Lead
Economist at the World Bank.

Out of the meeting came a request by USAID for TC to put
together a teacher prep program. It was a tall order, made even tougher by the
fact that the African nations themselves were looking for seasoned
professionals.

“They said, we want people with more than just a BA and
enthusiasm – and if they don’t have the training, let them get it by spending a
year in school in Africa first,” said Moock, who did just that in Tanzania.

In the first year, the program received 1,300 applicants,
out of which it chose only 157 candidates.
(The pool grew after President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous
inaugural speech in which he asked “Ask not what your country can do for you,
but what you can do for your country.”) Overall, the effort lasted for just six
years (an additional program, to train teacher trainers, was added), but its
impact was profound, Moock said.

“I worked in East Africa thereafter, and I never met an
African official who hadn’t met or been taught by a TEA teacher,” he said.
Meanwhile, alumni of the program not only still meet for reunions (this year
will be the 50th) but also raise money for the African schools they
worked in long ago.

“We’re still at it,” Moock said.

A presentation on TC’s second Afghanistan project, which
concluded in 2005, was supposed to have been made via Skype by one of its core
members, Frances Schoonmaker, Professor Emeritus of Education. However, a minor
earthquake in Karachi, Pakistan, where Schoonmaker has been working on another
TC project, scotched that plan – so Boultbee read a brief statement that
Schoonmaker had emailed instead.

It said, in essence, that when the Taliban fell in 2003, TC
was asked back to Afghanistan, where a team from the College had spent 25 years
developing textbooks in Dari and Pashto. This time, though, the focus was on
creating materials and programs that reflected values put forward by the
Afghans themselves.

“We asked all the participants to list 10 characteristics of
an ideally educated Afghan citizen and the kinds of schooling that would be
required to instill them,” wrote Schoonmaker.
From the responses received emerged eight standards, and from those, a
conceptual model for teacher education. That framework is still in use in
Afghanistan today, and similar models have been adopted in Pakistan and other
countries.

Madhabi Chatterji, Associate
Professor of Measurement- Evaluation & Education, spoke about TC’s global
engagement and legacy in measurement, assessment and evaluation. That legacy –
and to a very large extent, the field itself – began in 1904 when TC education
psychologist Edward L. Thorndike published An
Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements, since hailed
as the first textbook to define the knowledge base now known as classical test
theory.

During the 1950s, Thorndike’s son, Robert
L. Thorndike joined forces with two other TC faculty members, Elizabeth Hagen
and Irving Lorge, to create the the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Tests, later
called “Cognitive Ability Tests,” which were widely used to test scholastic
ability. In 1971, the younger Thorndike and Hagen also co-edited the second
edition of Educational Measurement, which has become the best-known reference handbook
in the field and has been regularly reissued since.

Still another faculty member, the late
Richard Wolf, served as the United States General Assembly representative for
the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IA),
which launched large-scale international assessment programs such as TIMSS and
PIRLS. In 2005, IEA established the Richard M. Wolf Memorial Award.

In 2006, Chatterji herself established TC’s
Assessment and Evaluation Research Initiative (AERI), which seeks to promote
meaningful use of assessment and evaluation information in practice and policy
contexts, internationally and across disciplines. From 200-8-11, AERI
collaborated with The Global Educational Leadership Foundation (tGELF) on
designing and assessing tGELF’s Life, Skills and Global Leadership Program,
conducted in pilot schools in Delhi. Last yearwith sponsorship from the
Educational Testing Service, the National Science Foundation and TC’s Provost’s
Investment Fund, AERI held a major conference on educational assessment,
accountability and equity that drew 250 attendees from around the world.
Chatterji is in the process of publishing an edited volume, Validity and Test Use, based on
presentations from the conference.

Susan Jay Spungin (Ed. D. ’75), President of Blind Biz and
former Vice President for International Programs and Special Projects at the
American Foundation for the Blind, described her recent efforts to help the
Sultanate of Oman, in the Persian Gulf, establish a system of inclusive
schooling for all children with disabilities.

Spungin, honored at this year’s Academic Festival as a
recipient of Teachers College’s Distinguished Alumni Award, said Oman was
initially failing in this effort because it lacked a universally understood and agreed-upon
definition of “inclusion.”

“One thing I’ve learned is that when you set up a system of
special education, it has to serve all disabilities,” Spungin said. “Also,
there has to be cooperation with the government and with parents of both
disabled and non-disabled children – particularly the latter, who often don’t
want that involvement.”

After winning buy-in for that definition, Spungin’s team,
which included Linda Hickson, TC Professor of Education, recommended that Oman
stop importing special education teachers from Jordan and Egypt, advice that
has since prompted the creation of a university-level special education teacher
training program in Oman. Oman may now lead a Gulf-wide conference on special
education.

Donald Fulton (Ed. D. ’91), a former New York City principal
ande Director of Children’s Education at the New York Botanical Garden,
described his efforts (through TC’s Office of International Affairs) to create
a U.S. study tour for Indonesia educators in the STEM fields (science,
technology, engineering and math). Fulton, in collaboration with Columbia’s
Center for Environment, Economy and Society (CEES), identified six New York
City high schools with exemplary STEM programs, as well as leading science educators
at the American Museum of Natural History and the Botanical Garden. He then
brought a group of Indonesian educators to New York City to visit those
institutions and to learn from TC faculty members. The group also met with the
Consul General at the Indonesian Consulate to frame out the challenges of
introducing progressive STEM education methods in Indonesia’s school system, which, though centrally directed,
spread out across the 13,000 islands that make up the nation.

Today there is a CEES program in Indonesia, and Fulton said
he would be going there soon to assess implementation of modern STEM
teaching.

The Use
and Abuse of Data in Educational Planning in Developing Countries

The good news, if you like data, is that when it comes to
education, there’s an incredible enthusiasm right now in developing countries
for data-based decision-making. The bad news is that the data isn’t always
reliable – at least, not when taken entirely at face value – and that the
enthusiasm doesn’t always translate into effective action

To underscore their point, the presenters – Mark Ginsburg
and Kurt Moses of FHI 360, a nonprofit human development organization,
displayed a photo of a flooded-out dirt road in South Sudan, captioned
“accuracy is difficult to get to.”

“When you see a statistic that there a developing nation has
1,490,633 students – well, no, not exactly,” said Ginsburg, Senior Advisor for
Research, Evaluatno and Teacher Educatyno at FHI 360, who is serving this year
as a visiting professor in TC’s Department of International and Transcultural
Studies. “It might mean that in 2006 we think there were between 1.34 and 1.89
million. Which means the ministry of education may not know whether enrollment
is actually rising or falling.” They might think it’s rising -- but if the
government shuts off the oil again, all bets are off.

Moses, Vice President and Director of Education Practices,
described the vagueness that can underlie the use of the concept of a
statistical “average.” For example, an average student-teacher ratio of 45 to 1
could mean that all school districts in a sample have that exact ratio, or that
one district has a ratio of 90 to 1 and while another has 9 to 1 – or all
manner of variation in between.

“The challenge of education planning is to make sure that
some of what you do bears some semblance to what you’re seeing,” he said,
displaying a photo of a packed classroom in in the African Republic of
Djibouti. “This,” he said, “is what 100 to one looks like.

To prompt effective action, researchers must employ
different ways of representing data to leaders, including maps, dashboards,
report cards, and even Google earth satellite photos that can reveal schools
that have no rooftops. At the same time, understanding the backstory behind the
numbers is absolutely critical. For instance figures suggesting robust school
spending in Liberia were undercut somewhat by the revelation that the money was
often ascribed to “ghost schools,” of which there were an estimated 400 to 600.

Still, the field is changing dramatically. New technologist
are enabling distribution of “just-in-time” data to mobile devices.

“That’s revolutionizing how quickly we can verify things,”
said Ginsburg. “During the refugee camps in Ethiopia, we were getting data in
Washington that was an hour old.”

Psychology
Without Borders: Providing Hope and Healing in the Face of Adversity

Adversity takes many forms: disaster, conflict, ill health,
family crisis, crime and so much more. Helping people cope, adjust and recover
from adversity is a major interest in psychology and related fields that are
well represented at TC. An Academic Festival panel on “Psychology Without
Borders” presented ways in which new research is shaping more effective ways of
helping people and communities in all cultures weather the emotional and
psychological effects of crisis.

Through 10 years of research in AIDS-ravaged areas of
southern Uganda, Lena Verdeli, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education,
found that a form of group therapy led by trained community members could
significantly reduce the paralyzing depression that was afflicting many
people.

“We started with an ethnographic assessment, to understand
local idioms of distress,” Verdeli said, adding that local traditional healers
had to sanction the project. The protocols of interpersonal therapy also needed
modifying, to recognize age, gender and other roles in the local society.

The findings –that people in therapy developed more hope for
the future, became more productive in their agricultural labor, and were more
willing to pay school fees for their children – exceeded Verdeli’s expectations.
She had been worried at the outset, she says: “Who are we to intervene? Is this
colonial? Shouldn’t we be addressing poverty and war instead? Can we really do
a rigorous trial?” Instead she came away with a very different conclusion: “No
mental health, no development.”

Claudia Cohen, TC Lecturer and Associate Director of the
International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR), described
work that the ICCCR is doing with the Fortune Academy, in Harlem, which
provides wraparound support to formerly incarcerated individuals. Here too, careful attention to the setting is
crucial, Cohen said. Along with such techniques as careful listening and
separating the problem from the person, understanding conflict styles and the
way conflict gets expressed in different cultures – even those within
neighborhoods or schools -- is a step toward resolving and preventing it.

“We’re working with them to allow people who come from
cultures of violence to learn skills of non-violence,” Cohen said. Integral
part of the project is to form a community of shared learning between TC, the
academy, and its clients.

Conflict does not always have to end up in destruction,
Cohen said. As if to echo this, George Bonanno, Professor of Psychology and
Education and Professor of Clinical Psychology, shared key findings of his
long-standing program of research on resilience. “Bad things” happen
frequently, Bonanno said, and what is remarkable is how often we weather them.
“Over the course of a life span, almost everyone faces the death of loved ones,
and most people are exposed to one or several violent or life-threatening
events. They can be devastating and disturbing, but we often survive them quite
well.”

People affected by a particular event or type of adversity
typically display one of three response patterns, Bonanno said. One is a
chronic, severe adverse effect; another is an adverse effect that gradually
decreases over time; and the third is a lesser effect that never becomes
severe. That third, “minimal-impact, resilient outcome” typically describes a
majority of the affected population, and sometimes up to two-thirds.

So what explains resilience? There is no simple explanation,
Bonanno said. “Resilience is not informed by one or two things. There are
likely many different routes to the same end.”